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Friday, October 30, 2015

Hallowed Eve

There are rules, when you are a ghost.
They are burned into our being with the same fire that lets us remain
in the Grey Lands after we die. Obey the rules, and you can return to
the land of the living rarely. Break them, and you can return more
often – until the Wardens find you, or you run into an exorcist or
something worse by far. But obey, and you can walk the world of the
living as if you were flesh and blood for one night every year. And
be far more than that as well.

The hallowed night. All Hallows Eve,
when the shadows are holy and you can bring fear into the hearts of
the living – or anything else you might desire to attempt. You can
terrify, but you cannot kill. Kiss, but you cannot love. There are
rules, after all, and some of them protect us as much as the living.
We have power on this night that we do not have on other nights. I
can do things I never could even
at the heights of my mortal madness.
I carry the cold of the grave about me, and the light that burns in
my eyes is that of a hereafter.

Because
I have no desire to fake being human. Because I am not in the mood
for such things. I move, and humans think
it a costume. I smile, and candy and drunkenness protect them against
some of my power. I am remembered in death as I was not in life, and
that is enough. I move through mirrors, flit through crowds. Create
stories, give birth to new urban legends. The night is mine, and I am
wild with it until I run into the boy.

He
looks to be about eleven, all thin and pale with a white cane and
dark glasses. I’d have taken him for human except his walk has no
fear to it, and his smile – his smile is like nothing I’d ever
seen, not even in a dream. I make a sound and he spins at the noise,
and his grin strikes
the air between us like the bells of a holy place that has
found itself become sacred. Sacred places are terrifying, but there
is nothing terrifying about his smile.

I know
enough to know that should scare me, and draw about me the cold from
places where the living cannot travel.

The
boy moves, faster than human boys could, and collides
with me to wrap his arms about me. For a moment, I think it an
exorcism – that I have,
somehow, breached the rules – and then I realize it is
a hug as he let go, “Hello,” bursting out of him with exclamation
marks behind it.

“Hello,”
I manage.

“My
name is Jay. What’s yours?”

“Alice.
Red Alice of the Bloodied Hands,” I say.

“Oh.
I’m just a Jay,” he says. “We hugged, right? It’s hard to
tell because your bindings feel all kinds of weird you know.”

“We
hugged, yes.”

“Good!”
He flings out another grin like a careless offering. “This is the
only night I can touch ghosts, since otherwise most of them poof and
vanish except Dyer, but he was pretty tough even if he wasn’t tough
like a Jay.”

I
flinch, not meaning to. All ghosts know of Dyer. The ghost-eater who
became a ghost on dying, was barred from the land of the dead – and
eventually found a way back inside. Most powerful of all the Wardens
who keep us in the Grey Lands, and this boy says his name with casual
ease as though speaking of a
friend.

“Can
I help you?” I say, because such a power should not be shunned.

The
boy blinks broken eyes. “Uhm! I think I’m okay, but we could play
tag if you want?”

“Tag?”

“You’re
pretty fast, I bet, and the exercise would be fun!”

“You
have a phone on you?” He nods. “Can you use it?”

“Of
course,” he says with innocent pride.

“Look
up my name.”

He
asks his phone to look me up, and it turns the text it finds into
speech. Jay listens for a good minute, then turns it off and looks
up. “You killed lots of people?”

“I
murdered them, yes.”

“Did
they deserve it?”

“I
have been a ghost for over two years years. I ... no, I do not think
they did. No matter what was done to me, what I sought revenge for.”

“It
was a really meany post on twitter,” he says, and I have no idea if
I’m being rebuked or not.

“There
was also a facebook post of me. They – used me, and I had revenge.”

“You
could have something else. Like a friend,” he says happily, and
insists we find a park and play tag.

I
don’t have it in me to say no, even if I should. It turns out he is
very fast, and ticklish despite everything else. We play tag for half
an hour, Jay and I, and when it ends my hands are no longer bloodied
at all.

“What
have you done?” I demand, in the voice I destroyed Mo with.

“I
didn’t do anything,” Jay says, staring up at me unafraid. “I
let you make a choice, and you make a good one.” He
smiles, and this smile is soft and a little strange, this night
touching whatever he is as well. “You tried to use me and I think
that meant I used you as well.”

And I
think about death, and hallows, and holy nights. I wonder why the
rules exist, for the first time, and what this night is meant to do.
“I can pass on. Beyond the
Grey Lands.”

“I
think so, if you want to?” he offers. “I don’t know much about
that stuff at all. Honcho says it’s not safe to look too deeply
into how the universe works in case I find a fnord. Which I haven’t
yet!”

I just
nod, and thank him in a daze, and he offers up a huge grin before
checking his phone, says he’s late for a party and vanishes
somewhere else in the world between moments.

I am
cleansed, and I am Alice, I am me and I am free – and yet I think
it is for the best that I am not invited to whatever party the boy
has gone to.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”